Paper abstract:

The vast literature devoted to the trajectories of the Jewish resettlement project in the Far East has left aside the spatial aspects of the project. By adopting the "empty territory" postulate, the researchers ignored the project's border localization and its deep ties to the tsarist and Soviet border regimes. Studies of the borders of Inner Asia provide an opportunity to fill this gap by presenting the essential role of the border regime for all stages of the project's existence. Localization in the border zone has largely determined the main factors of its development. An equally important task of the article is to de-colonize the dominant perspective of the Birobidjan project research, in which the colonial categories of empty land, useless territory, natives, and comical distance from the center are accepted as legitimate descriptions of reality. The tragic history of the Jewish migration does not exclude Birobidjan from the colonial archive of the Far East. The proposed attempt to show a broader perspective of the resettlement project provides an opportunity to take a fresh look at the Russian model of presence in Inner Asia. The experience of the Jewish Autonomous Region shows that a colonial cultural formation can exist without the use of violence and even with a certain sympathy for the local population. The rejection of one-sided prospects for overcoming the backwardness of the region (where yesterday's owners of the territory turn into an obstacle to development) can be a step towards the decolonization of consciousness and the revision of the colonial experience of the region. In this context, decolonization means, first of all, the rejection of the rationalization of repressive policies, finding of a balance in relations with indigenous peoples, and the rejection of the idea of the region as a white sheet on which a migrant from Eastern Europe writes his history.